By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Arizonans are well-acquainted with the open-borders reputation of the regional bishops’ lobbying arm, the Arizona Catholic Conference, of whom the Diocese of Tucson’s liberal Bishop Gerald Kicanas is an unabashed champion.
These ideas were on display again in Washington, D.C., in February testimony. They’re ideas that were strongly rejected by a Republican Latino activist in a February 22 interview with The Wanderer. But first, some words from Kicanas.
Drawing to the conclusion of his prepared remarks before a U.S. House subcommittee on February 11 on “Interior Immigration Enforcement Legislation,” Kicanas said:
“We are hopeful that, as our public officials debate this issue, that immigrants, regardless of their legal status, are not made scapegoats for the challenges we face as a nation. Rhetoric which attacks the human rights and dignity of the migrant are not becoming of a nation of immigrants. Neither are xenophobic and anti-immigrant attitudes, which only serve to lessen us as a nation.”
Kicanas was testifying before the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security, as a consultant to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Migration, to present “the Catholic Church’s perspective.” Kicanas and the USCCB are as close on the issue of illegal immigration as two people-smugglers squirming together under a border fence.
Almost five full years earlier, on July 14, 2010, Kicanas testified before another U.S. House panel, the Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law, on the topic of, “The Ethical Imperative for Reform of Our Immigration System.”
Drawing to the conclusion of his prepared remarks in 2010, Kicanas said:
“We are hopeful that, as our public officials debate this issue, that immigrants, regardless of their legal status, are not made scapegoats for the challenges we face as a nation. Rhetoric which attacks the human rights and dignity of the migrant are not becoming of a nation of immigrants. Neither are xenophobic and anti-immigrant attitudes, which only serve to lessen us as a nation.”
He testified then as vice president of the USCCB, on behalf of the USCCB and its Committee on Migration.
In some ways, nothing changed in the USCCB perspective between 2010 and 2015, and indeed for even longer. “Massive illegal immigration” dare not be mentioned. And opposition to this unmentionable reality is “rhetoric” attacking “human rights and dignity.” This rhetoric only exposes “xenophobic and anti-immigrant attitudes” that “lessen us as a nation.”
It’s all the fault of those who disagree with the USCCB’s insistent left-wing politicking.
Thanks to this intransigence, something did change in those five years besides Kicanas no longer holding his lofty position as vice president of the USCCB because his term expired.
The Democratic Party, which solidly controlled both houses of Congress in 2010, is a defensive minority in both houses in 2015.
One reason for this, many conservative political activists know, is the Democrats’ and USCCB’s refusal to face the realities of defiant, dangerous, overwhelming, unending illegal immigration that both organizations encourage, to the detriment of the illegal aliens who listen to them.
Fortunately, legitimately concerned U.S. voters cast the Democrats out of power, in part because of this offense. However, the USCCB still needs to be persuaded to drink some strong doses of healing medicine.
The bishops will acknowledge, as sort of an afterthought, that more fundamental changes must be undertaken, but their repeated emphasis on “comprehensive immigration reform” obscures the bigger truth.
Toward the bottom of his first page of testimony text in February 2015, Kicanas acknowledged in a sentence: “Perhaps most importantly, the United States must work with Mexico and other nations to address the root causes of migration, so that migrants and their families may remain in their homelands and live in dignity.”
Not until the third page of his text did Kicanas recall Pope Benedict XVI saying, as that Pope flew to visit the United States in 2008, that the “fundamental solution is that there would no longer exist the need to emigrate because there would be in one’s own country sufficient work, a sufficient social fabric, such that no one has to emigrate.”
Although most news outlets ignored those words by Benedict in 2008 and thereafter, The Wanderer quickly reported them at that time and later, citing an in-flight transcript supplied by John L. Allen Jr., then of the National Catholic Reporter.
If the USCCB were to regularly headline and emphasize fundamental truths about the sort of reform needed, it likely would find Americans assured that everyone’s on the same page, instead of most Americans rightfully being concerned that the USCCB is insisting on its own misguided, headstrong agenda.
On the bottom of his third page of February testimony, Kicanas said: “I must say upfront that the U.S. bishops continue to be concerned with the tone on Capitol Hill toward immigrants. We do not agree with terms that characterize immigrants as less than human, since no person is ‘illegal’ in the eyes of God. Such harsh rhetoric has been encouraged by talk radio and cable TV, for sure, but also has been used by public officials, including members of Congress.”
Thus the USCCB spokesman reverted to familiar misleading moralizing, lecturing that someone who factually describes a lawbreaker as an illegal immigrant is actually saying he’s an illegal human being and, darn it, God just doesn’t agree.
In his July 2010 congressional testimony, Kicanas also made comments that most if not all Americans would agree with, but the remarks again weren’t presented with emphasis.
In the last sentence of his fourth paragraph of prepared testimony advocating “comprehensive immigration reform,” Kicanas said in 2010: “Perhaps most importantly, the United States must work with Mexico and other nations to address the root causes of migration, so that migrants and their families may remain in their homelands and live in dignity.”
On the third page of his 2010 testimony, Kicanas also recalled Pope Benedict’s words in 2008 about the “fundamental solution” being that “no one has to emigrate.”
By now, a comparison of the two texts shows notable repetition, for in 2010 Kicanas also said the U.S. bishops “are very concerned with the tone on Capitol Hill toward immigrants. We do not agree with terms that characterize immigrants as less than human, since no person is ‘illegal’ in the eyes of God. Such harsh rhetoric has been encouraged by talk radio and cable TV, for sure….” Et cetera.
One important difference in the texts was that in 2010, Barack Obama hadn’t yet illegally welcomed “dreamers” (2012) and alien adults (2014) into the U.S. as deserving of “deferred enforcement.” But the USCCB was glad when he did so.
In his February statement, Kicanas said the USCCB supports Obama’s November 20, 2014, “executive action” to keep millions of illegal immigrants here, and doesn’t want it rescinded. Kicanas said Obama’s action should act as a spur to Congress to pass “immigration reform legislation.”
Ignoring any objection to the sweeping illegality of Obama’s imperial “executive action,” Kicanas said “it would help as many as four million persons and keep an untold number of families together.”
This stance that maximizing the violation of the law is desirable recalled Kicanas’ statement in his 2010 testimony that “It is important that any legalization program capture the maximum number of those who currently live in the shadows, so that we significantly reduce, if not eliminate, the undocumented population in this country.”
That is a jaw-dropping belief that if the U.S. can simply legalize every illegal alien here, then everyone will be “out of the shadows,” and there won’t be any illegal immigrants remaining.
It would be hard to square that with Pope Benedict’s statement Kicanas cited, nor the USCCB’s reputed desire “that migrants and their families may remain in their homelands and live in dignity.”
Twisting History
In a February 22 interview with The Wanderer, Reymundo Torres, president of the Arizona Latino Republican Association (ALRA), sharply criticized the USCCB, not only for its misleading advocacy but also for its expansive welcome to illegal immigrants while neglecting its primary responsibility to U.S. Catholics.
Torres, an orthodox Catholic and fluent in Spanish and English, is the third generation of his family to live in the U.S. after their arrival from Mexico.
In both his 2010 and 2015 statements, Kicanas likened Jesus Himself to the status of illegal immigrants, saying (in the same words each time): “Jesus Himself was an itinerant preacher without a home of his own, as well as a refugee fleeing the terror of Herod.”
Torres called this “a twisting of history” used to “trivialize” Jesus’ role. The Holy Family fled because “Herod’s order was to murder — murder — all the male children,” not because St. Joseph was looking for a job in Egypt, Torres said.
It’s an “absolutely insulting” comparison, Torres said, adding that when Herod’s threat had passed, “The angel came to Mary and told them to go back….They knew Jesus had work to do in their own home.”
The Holy Family didn’t go to the pharaoh and say, “Now I’m one of your subjects. Feed me bread and give me a place to live” and invite the rest of the family to come join them in Egypt, he said.
U.S. bishops and clergy neglect their responsibility to present the Catholic faith in a compelling way to modern, Westernized congregations, Torres said, but instead try to fill their pews with new arrivals whose knowledge of the faith is limited to a celebration of village festivals, a local priest whose orders they follow, and “who won’t question the status quo.”
Bishops “are losing people that happen to be educated, that happen to be Westernized. . . . There is absolute surrender of [bishops’] primary responsibility,” the “salvation of souls,” he said.
In Europe, Torres said, one sees the same abdication of responsibility, with “huge houses of worship turning into museums. People see no relevance to their lives,” while the Church spares itself from addressing this issue. It’s “a liturgical laziness, a clerical laziness,” he said.
Politically, Torres said, “basically a blanket amnesty” is only “the beginning of something greater,” not the end of the immigration process.
Torres, who stays in touch with developments in Mexico, said “there’s a nationalist undercurrent” there that recalls the Mexican-American War in the mid-19th century and hopes that territory won by the U.S. “someday … will be restored to them.” In Tucson and California, he said, “ethnic studies” classes “call for the overthrow of this government” and the restoration of territory to Mexico.
“Citizenship and legalization are not the end,” Torres said. “It’s only the beginning” of “what they consider their rights are.”
In addition, he said, bishops have an attitude that poverty conveys moral superiority, which always puts the U.S. at a disadvantage.
By this calculation, he said, the U.S. “is morally deficient,” even when contrasted with countries whose leadership is “quite corrupt, uncaring. . . . The poor countries always have the moral upper hand” and should prevail against the U.S.
A Horrific Journey
There’s an attitude among bishops that “God created the world, man has no right to partition it” into countries, Torres said, adding that this goes against the experience of Catholics living in the U.S., who know that “hundreds of thousands of people have fought and died for” this nation.
Any nation deserves to have the security of knowing who’s leaving and arriving in it, which includes protecting those already here, he said.
The Church doesn’t tell the full story about child migrants, like those arriving last summer, Torres said.
They’re hurled over the border “like grappling hooks” in order to imbed here, despite a horrific journey, so the rest of their families can join them, he said.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress